92 music, philosophy, and modernity
feeling and the convictions ( 1 )that, because being always precedes our
particular form of existence, it cannot be reduced to what we know of
it, and ( 2 ) that the being of the I is not wholly transparent to the I itself.
These convictions are vital to the revaluation of music in Romantic
philosophy. Given the limits of philosophy’s ability to grasp the funda-
mental nature of our being, the feeling which is our most fundamental
way of being demands other forms of expression.
Feeling is linked to the realisation that our being is finite, and not
wholly autonomous. It consequently plays a key role in the constitution
of time, which is, of course, essential to the experience of music. The
experience of time, in which the present is suspended between the loss
of what is past and the absence of what is to come, involves a feeling
of lack, which can be articulated in many forms. However, philosoph-
ical thinking traditionally relies on the move from finite apprehen-
sions of being to the attempt to comprehend finitude in an overall
account of the nature of things. The feeling of lack depends, after
all, on the link between past, present, and future, and this involves
the idea of the totality of time. But how does this move beyond fini-
tude emerge in the first place? The tension between feeling as limita-
tion and the sense that thought transcends limitation by itsawareness
of being limited gives rise to some of the most important Romantic
ideas. As Novalis puts it: ‘We feel ourselves as a part and precisely for
that reason are the whole’ (Novalis 1978 : 44 ). Friedrich Schlegel sug-
gests that ‘while we perhaps often feel ourselves completely limited
and finite, at the same time we are repeatedly convinced of our infi-
nite egoity (‘Ichheit’)’ (Schlegel 1964 a: 334 ). This conviction results
from our awareness both of the infinite nature of the universe and
of thinking’s capacity to transcend the particular by locating it in a
notional, but never finally articulable, totality, such as that of time. A
‘thought or concept’ cannot, though, Schlegel insists, be absolute ‘as
these are too limited, can never be the highest, and always have feel-
ings as their basis’ (ibid.: 391 ). Feeling involves both limitation and
its opposite, because the awareness of limitationaslimitation cannot
itself just be derived from limitation, even though it requires limitation
to emerge.
These ideas are closely connected to the Romantic understanding
of music. In a note of 1827 Schlegel says: ‘Music is most of all longing’
(Schlegel 1969 : 551 ). Rather than having a vague, merely affective
status, longing plays a central epistemological and ontological role in
Romantic philosophy. It has to do with the idea that the motivation